Now, let me start off... I was only 2 when this happened, but it's an incident that's known to many familiar with RAF Cold War history. I happened to have just finished the tour of the bridge and it's mechanisms with the kids a few weeks ago and had been trying to think up new secondary missions and it occured to me that we should bring this incident to Arma.

It's a work in progress and some of the code is in the mission, but I didn't finish testing and polishing it before the release. There was quite a few bug fixes in the release so I felt under pressure to get it out and the protestflight mission took up all of my time. If there are no further bugs reported, I will be finishing protestflight and will do another release as soon as it's done.

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Thanks for the update, are you planning any mod support? Or could it be converted to work with other mods, as i would quite like to make/see an Unsung Version.

I'm afraid the short answer is no, or at least, I won't be doing it. Originally, the mission used RHS, and then CUP, but it was too hard for me to maintain. They are both wonderful things, but they were too buggy to work with. I was spending more time trying to work around tricky stuff in the mod than making the mission. One faction of civilians in CUP, for example, are configged as soldiers and when I reported it, I was roundly blanked. When I made a bug report about the interior LOD of a west vehicle in RHS, the report was binned with a single reply. "WIP". So, I moved on :)

So I took the decision to develop the mission in vanilla, but hopefully, make it obvious and easy for others to mod it. I've no problem with other added mod packs like Unsung, RHS and CUP, none at all, I just don't have the time to do it myself.

Moving it to other islands is a couple of hours work, but I've not really found any that work for the mission. I works best on large landmasses with a number of large towns and a bunch of coastal airbases. It takes half a day to do.

I'm planning to get the convoy interdiction missions going next - I've been fiddling with them for weeks, perhaps months if you include summer breaks.

There's been a lot of new routines added to the mission init. It uses quite a lot more memory now, but it prepares some large arrays for use later in the mission. Deep water, destroyable buildings, road bridges etc. All of these now are found during the mission init, rather than when the mission is running, so should hopefully clean out some lag spikes.

I've fixed the broken BI triggers either holding up, or completing too early, the assault phase of the primary targets. Don't know why they were broken, just that they were.

Also, the reinforcement guys that are dropped or driven into the PT should now be less superhuman.

2811: Mission build number now written to server log.
2813: Convoykill2 (hereinafter known as ck2) uses 'pathfinder' method for orientating and ordering convoy vecs.
2814: Debug makemarker script now returns a reference to the marker it just created.
2829: Added an 'unstick' for group leader in ck2.
2833: ck2 unstick system now works for all convoy vehicles if they have a driver and fuel. Also, it can push backwards if theres an object in front.
2835: ck2 truck types now choose tempests or zamacx and then chooses classnames from inside that.
2841: findroads2 (hereinafter known as fr2) function replaces findroads function. This is better at finding straight stretches of road.
2846: Fixed softtrigger not working on towns after the first airfield assault.
2849: Fixed softtrgger bug where it wasn't counting CQB troops.
2850: fr2 can now work with 2nd roadsconnected result element. Greatly increases it's reliability.
2852: Added occasional intel updates for players playing the ck2 mission. Also kills drivers on foot to stop them walking to destination.
2853: Improved ck2 conveoy vehicle classname arrays.
2854: Added new radar trailer to bigarty array for vehicle depot kill 2ndary mission. Also added it so that it can be the primary target radar asset.
2856: Added ck2 mission to sm manager roster so it can be played.
2853: Build.

The convoy kill mission. Lots of work went into this Myself and Haz did the heavy lifting but the community helped out here and there. Contributors in this thread were most helpful, as well as here. In particular, @pierremgi broke the back of the problems I was having with AI convoys. Forever grateful, mate!
The mission itself is in a few parts. Being dynamic, it has to choose a start and an end point. It only chooses those on the same landmass as the players.

It then finds a straight stretch of road to spawn the convoy, but before it actually does that, it makes a man on an ATV and sees which way he goes when given the order to go to the destination. The convoy is then spawned facing the direction he went in. Also, the vehicle in the convoy closest to the way he went is designated group leader and the rest added to his group. Usually, the first and last vehicles are escort vehicles and the ones in between are just trucks.

Once they are underway, it does a few checks to make sure everything is working. If a vehicle has a driver and fuel and is stopped for more than 5 seconds, it is given a little nudge forwards. If there's an object in front, the nudge is backwards. This seems to resolve much of the wierdness that plagues AI convoys.

This mission can take some time to start, it only actually starts when the first player joins, so that first join can take quite a long time. I've seen as much as 45 seconds on my test server.

During mission init, the mission creates lots of arrays of information it will use later. For example, it makes a list of all the deep water points on the map. This is quite time consuming - it uses a lot of memory too - and so it's best to do it before the players get in, rather than do it mid mission, potentially causing lag and warp.

Using the 'autoinit' server parameter might mitigate this to some extent. It starts the mission when the server starts, not when players join. This might break stuff - I've not tried it yet, it's on the to do list.

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As @Tankbuster stated, -autoInit will help. Note: I think this locks mission parameters though even if you #missions -> select mission -> edit or at least used to. In your CfgMissions in server config file you can set them like so:

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We decided we didn't like the old text based method of showing the players the enemy force. At the same time, we didn't want to say '8 soldiers, 2 tanks and an Ifrit still to kill' so we came up with this new method.

When the primary target starts, all ten icons are show in each of the categories (unless there's zero of that type) , as you kill them, the markers are removed, so if there's 100 men and you kill 10, you will see 9 icons. If it starts with 40 and you kill 10, you'll see 7.5 icons. So we're showing a fairly accurate measure of the strength without giving away actual numbers.

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Magazine repacking will be in the next patch as well. Along with backpack locking (inspired by @fn_Quiksilver's I&A). Regarding the coding process involved for this it sucks that you can't remove partial magazines with X ammo count. You have to do some sloppy workaround...

2

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Brilliant stuff guys, I stuck it on my server the other night we played for 8 hours straight was some epic action going on, will be posting some of it when it is uploaded and I even got kidnapped by a ghost car, sometimes arma gives us the funniest bugs, looking forward to some more great action in the next update.